BGuthrie Photos: AZ -- Petrified Forest Natl Park -- Terrain

AZ -- Petrified Forest Natl Park -- Terrain:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. PETTER_060524_020.JPG: Badlands
2. PETTER_060524_028.JPG: Badlands: This moonscape of hills and gullies is called badlands. The Blue Mesa badlands are made up of rock known as the Chinle Formation, which extends from Texas, across northern Arizona, and into Utah. The rock is mostly fine-grained clay and siltstone, but also contains sandstone and conglomerate. Bentonite, a major ingredient, swells and becomes sticky when wet and cracks and shrinks when it dries. The constant shrinking and swelling of the surface gives the Chinle its elephant-skin texture. Petrified logs appear to be perched on pedestals of the softer clays. Once the clay erodes under the logs, they will topple down the hillside.
3. PETTER_060524_055.JPG: Dendritic Drainages: Water has etched a design in the desert floor like the branches of a tree. This drainage pattern is called dendritic, from the Latin word for tree, dendron. These streams flow north to the Pueblo River which stretches across the valley below in the distance. The Puerco carries silt-laden water over its sandy bed only when it rains and its tributaries are running. Its name means "Dirty River." The headwaters of the Puerco are in mountains near Gallup, New Mexico, at 7,000 feet above sea level. Near Holbrook, Arizona, it joins the Little Colorado River, which flows into the master stream, the Colorado. Along most of its length, the Puerco occupies a flat desert valley and provides a natural corridor for a railroad and interstate highway.
4. PETTER_060524_070.JPG: Blue Mesa Trail: The Blue Mesa Trail is a one-mile walk down into the heart of the badlands of Petrified Forest. Along the trail are signs that discuss some of the processes that have formed and are still forming this desert landscape. Allow approximately 45 minutes for a leisurely stroll around the loop....
5. PETTER_060524_072.JPG: Blue Mesa Trail
6. PETTER_060524_083.JPG: Conglomerates: Conglomerates are what their name implies -- a collection of cobbles and pebbles cemented together. The sandstone caprock of Blue Mesa that you are walking through contains gravels that were carried in a stream and laid down here 225 million years ago. The different-sized pebbles in this conglomerate indicate that the stream was moving too fast to do a good job of sorting the rocks.
7. PETTER_060524_098.JPG: Small Cracks: Many small cracks in the slops provide avenues for water. As the water enlarges the crevices, pipes form that lead down below ground. The water eventually flows out at the base of the hills.
8. PETTER_060524_119.JPG: Pastel Bands: The pastel bands of color in Blue Mesa indicate the type of environment in which the sediments were deposited. Blues and greys are a sign of carbon from decaying organic material that was buried or under water and not exposed to the air. Reds result from an iron mineral, hematite. When exposed to air, even a small amount of iron causes the rocks to oxidize, or rust. The whites represent nearly pure bentonite clay. Ground water, percolating through the buried sediments, also accounts for some color changes.
9. PETTER_060524_134.JPG: Fossils of Claims: Geologically speaking, these soft hills are eroding very quickly. Fossils exposed by one rain storm might be eroded away by the next. Teeth and bones of many long-extinct reptiles have been found. Fossils of clams, fish, amphibians, and insects have also been uncovered. Tropical plants left delicate leaf impressions, and in rare cases the leaf itself, encased in rock. Other ancient plants that have been identified include giant horsetails and ferns.
10. PETTER_060524_149.JPG: Mud on Slopes: During heavy rainfalls, mud on the steep slopes collects in pellets. These roll down stream channels and disintegrate, and the mud becomes suspended in the stream. The sediment grinds along the streambeds, and the channel grows deeper.
11. PETTER_060524_175.JPG: Wind and Water: Wind is an obvious force in Petrified Forest. It has been clocked blowing across the desert at up to 85 miles an hour. As an agent of erosion, it is most important in moving small particles of dust and sand already broken down by water. Rocks and pieces of petrified wood have been literally sand-blasted into "ventrifacts," triangular-shaped rocks with facets like cut gemstones.
12. PETTER_060524_181.JPG: Volcanic Ash: About 225 million years ago, Arizona was in the tropics. The climate throughout the Southwest was mostly humid, with alternating wet and dry periods. Southern Arizona was higher than northern Arizona. As rocks in the southern highlands erodes, streams carried the sediments here and deposited them in lakes and swamps on a flat floodplain. Interspersed with erosion were pulses of volcanic activity in the southern highlands. Volcanic ash rained down into streams, was carried here and deposited. The ash (now bentonite clay) and the sediments are what make up these formations.
13. PETTER_060524_188.JPG: Clay Minerals: Clay minerals are microscopic, three-layered chemical sandwich. The "bread" consisted of sheets of silica and elements like magnesium, and the "filling" is water. When the whole mass becomes wet after a rain, it acts like a sponge, expanding to seven or eight times its dry volume. Clay's great absorption capacity makes it ideal for bonding agents, industrial catalysts, and cat litter. This same characteristic, however, makes it highly undesirable as a roadbed.
14. PETTER_060524_194.JPG: Badlands Hills: These badlands hills are washing away fast. On steeper slopes, as much as two and a half inches of material has been found to be eroded in ten years. At this rate, in a thousand years a 25-foot-high hill could disappear. Clays are stingy in giving up water to plants, so few are able to survive here. The lack of plants, whose roots would have sediments in place, also helps account for the fast erosion.
15. PETTER_060524_199.JPG: Universal Processes: The desert is an excellent place to see geology in action. The forces of wind and water that have shaped this land are continuing every day in a dynamic process that both destroys and creates. Along this trail through these eroded hills you have had a close-up view of some of the changes wrought by these universal processes.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Petrified Forest National Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Petrified Forest National Park is along Interstate 40 between Holbrook and Navajo, in the United States. It features one of the world's largest and most colorful concentrations of petrified wood, mostly of the species Araucarioxylon arizonicum.

The park consists of two large areas connected by a north–south corridor. The northern area encompasses part of the multihued badlands of the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation called the Painted Desert. The southern area includes colorful terrain and several concentrations of petrified wood. Several American Indian petroglyph sites are also found in the southern area. Near the south end of the park is Agate House, a Native American building of petrified wood, reconstructed during the 1930s.

Status:

The Petrified Forest area was designated a National Monument on December 8, 1906. The Painted Desert was added later. On December 9, 1962, the whole monument was made a national park. It covers 218,533 acres (341.5 sq mi; 885 km�). Hiking opportunities are limited: the longest established trail in the park extends for only two miles; the others are one mile (1.6 km) or less. Backcountry camping and hiking are allowed by permit only. A 28-mile (45 km) long road runs through much of the park. Landmarks include the Agate House, built of petrified wood, and the Agate Bridge, a petrified log spanning a wash.
Structures made of Petrified Wood
Structures made of Petrified Wood

Petrification:

The pieces of permineralized wood are fossil Araucariaceae, a family of trees that is extinct in the Northern Hemisphere but survives in isolated stands in the Southern Hemisphere. During the Late Triassic, this desert region was located in the tropics and was seasonally wet and dry. In seasonal flooding, the trees washed from where they grew and accumulated in sandy river channels, where they were buried periodically by layers of gravely sand, rich in volcanic ash from volcanoes further to the west. The volcanic ash was the source of the silica that helped to permineralize the buried logs, replacing wood with silica, colored with oxides of iron and manganese. Several major and many smaller concentrations of petrified wood occur in the park, corresponding to several stratigraphic intervals in the Sonsela Member and aptly named Petrified Forest Member of the Chinle Formation. The major concentrations have been termed "forests" (e.g. Rainbow Forest, Crystal Forest, Black Forest, etc.) although the vast majority of the fossil tree trunks are preserved in a prone position and have been transported at least some distance from their original growth areas. However, in-place stumps of trees do occur in several areas (not easily accessible to the casual visitor), and many of the logs probably did not travel far before burial.

The Chinle Formation at Petrified Forest National Park also has produced abundant fossil leaves, vertebrates (including giant crocodile-like reptiles called phytosaurs, large salamander-like amphibians called metoposaurs, some of the earliest dinosaur fossils from North America), and invertebrates (including freshwater snails and clams).

Much of the striking banded coloration of the Chinle Formation badlands that make up the Painted Desert region is due to soil formation (pedogenesis) during the Late Triassic. These paleosols (ancient soils) preserve evidence of conditions during the Triassic including the nature of the landscape and the paleoclimate. The Chinle paleosols suggest that the climate was dramatically seasonal, with distinct very wet and very dry seasons. This climate was probably similar to the modern monsoon of the Indian Ocean region, and was characteristic of tropical areas of Late Paleozoic and Early Mesozoic Earth when all the continents had assembled to form the supercontinent Pangaea.

Theft:

Theft of petrified wood has remained a problem despite protection and despite the fact that nearby vendors sell wood collected legally from private land. Despite a guard force of seven National Park Service rangers, fences, warning signs, and the threat of a $275 fine, about 12 to 14 tons of the fossil wood disappears from the Petrified Forest every year.
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2006 photos: Trips this year: Florida (two separate trips including Lotusphere and taking care of mom), three weeks out west (including Yellowstone), Williamsburg, San Diego (comic book convention), and Georgia. Equipment this year: I was using all six Fuji cameras at various times -- an S602Zoom, two S7000s,a S5200, an S9000, and an S9100. The majority of pictures this year were taken with the S9000. I have to say, the S7000s was the best camera I've used up to this point.. Number of photos taken this year: 183,000.
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